Jack Kemp arrived in February 1989 at the dark halls of the Department or Housing and Urban Development (HUD). During the Energy Crisis, the lights had been dimmed to save electricity, but as secretary, Kemp ordered them turned up. With that action, he began a two-year spending spree which has transformed its colossal concrete headquarters...
1116 search results for: Forgotten%2BHistory
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Western Swing
The Hollows, Hasty and Happy, were hardly ever sure where they were. At times, they weren’t sure who they were, either, but it never mattered for them because they were very, very rich. Hasty was from Chicago originally, and Happy from Mississippi, where she had earned half a degree from Ole Miss. In the days...
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A Clearing in the Wilderness
“After all, money, as they say, is miraculous.” —Thomas Carlyle The economics profession, like many other branches of the social sciences, long ago had to decide whether to adopt positivist methods, as if its objects of study were organisms of constant and predictable motion, or to account for the infinite variety in human affairs by...
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Up From Television
“I came to cast fire upon earth; and would that it were already kindled!” —Luke 12:29 In order to mark the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s election to the Papacy, Italian Radio and Television commissioned Vittorio Messori to conduct a live television interview with the Pope. It must have seemed a good idea...
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The Forgotten
Yesterday the AP had a very interesting story on newly declassified documents that support the view that FDR and Churchill knew that the Soviets were responsible for the massacre of over 20,000 Polish prisoners of war at the same time they were publicly following Stalin’s lead and blaming the massacre on the Nazis. Later on, of...
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How Do You Know?
How much is actually known and not just supposed or imagined? A lot more, surely, than it is fashionable to think, at least in the world that moral and literary theorists seem to inhabit. So much more, that it is easy to forget how much by which we interpret the world and its texts is...
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The Fall of Lord Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik)
Mark Steyn once told me a revealing story about Conrad Black’s “conservative” Canadian national newspaper, the National Post. It seems star columnist David Frum had ventured this evaluation: “The Post has a problem. It was started to save Canada, but Canada isn’t worth saving.” Ah, the authentic voice of the Canadian neoconservative! Or, as English...
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I Am Not Ashamed Either
Ever since the cinéaste Nino Frank first used the term in France in 1946 (he never said he invented it), there has been considerable controversy about the meaning of “film noir” and various attempts to define it, some more or less authoritative. The essential arguments have been usefully collected in Silver and Ursini’s Film Noir...
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Let’s Cheat on Our Taxes
As I write, April 15 is still fresh in the mind, and the sting of death remains, combining the current pangs of tax extraction with the promise of a greater burden to come, thanks to the Barackification of heathcare. So imagine my delight when I read in a back issue of ...
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Inaugurating a Movement
It was a clarion call to his supporters and a hard slap in the face to his adversaries—the latter being gathered just a few feet behind him as he delivered his Inaugural Address. Donald J. Trump never minces words, and on January 20 he showed that he isn’t about to start, now that he’s President...
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C-H-A-R-I-S-M-A
Mikhail Gorbachev has it, so do Jesse Jackson, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Violetta Chamorro. John Kennedy personified it, Ronald Reagan scripted it, and Michael Dukakis experienced what life can be like for a politician without it. It’s how success and failure in national politics is so often now spelled: it’s c-h-a-r-i-s-m-a. Like so many...
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I Remember
For some years I have lived in Québec as a friendly alien from the United States, traveling from time to time back to my native Minnesota and other states to practice law in my fields of interest. I am married to a French-Canadian wife who is a member of the bar and mairesse of our...
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Alfred Rosenberg: The Triumph of Tedium
A few months after the outbreak of war, in January 1940, Nazi leaders held a merry meeting. They had plenty to be cheerful about. Poland had been crushed in a few weeks, and the new Soviet alliance had been “sealed in blood,” as Stalin put it. By a secret agreement in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of...
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What So Proudly We Hailed
At the Jan. 6 rally in Washington D.C., those of us entering the VIP section were required to throw our tote bags in the trash. We divvied up various items, threw the rest away, and entered the grounds. When we left the rally, someone had emptied all of those cans onto the street and the...
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A Doctor in Spite of Himself
On December 3, 1989, the London Telegraph included a piece of academic news from the United States: “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, murdered in 1968, was—in addition to his other human failings—a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his...
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George Garrett Talks
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they...
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The Whippoorwill
“The pure products of America go crazy.” —William Carlos Williams The go-to-hell attitude, unique features, and deceptive talent by which we know Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) were the product of his heredity and experience. His father was a Scotch-Irish South Carolinian with some Amerindian blood—he died young in a railroad accident. His...
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Obama in Afghanistan
Addressing the nation on Tuesday from Bagram Air Base, President Barack Obama declared the advent of a new, post-war era in the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan. During his six-hour unannounced visit Obama signed an agreement with President Hamid Karzai that is supposed to define the role of the U.S. after the...
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The Lone Ranger’s Legacy
After serving for more than three decades on the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on Saturday, September 3, at the age of 80, having lost his battle with thyroid cancer. With Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s recent announcement of her retirement, there are now two vacant seats on the Court. Just over a...
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Noche de Desastre
The morning after meeting Juanito Villalobos, Héctor, throwing Dr. Spock’s strictures to the wind, put his foot down when Dubya demanded to be taken to the Lion Habitat immediately after the family’s return from breakfast at McDonald’s. His patience was suddenly at an end. Although the Habitat itself was free, the Villas’ suite by now...
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The Unbanable Book
A recent full-page advertisement in the Chicago Tribune, which no longer calls itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper,” listed four documents that supposedly are foundational: the Magna Carta, the Treaty of Versailles, the Declaration of Independence, and the Infiniti Retailer Pledge. These four, according to the advertiser, Infiniti, are totally trustworthy, because: “A promise is a...
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Letter From Texas: Gott Mit Uns
As modern imperialism grows, even the regions within those countries under its rule become homogenized. Within the subnational regions, smaller ethnic enclaves, with their diverse cultures, tend to take one of two paths. They become tourist traps where the natives are ...
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Neocons in the Dark
As I write this the news of Tom Wolfe’s death is breaking. The stylish author of The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the progenitor of the “New Journalism,” Wolfe was one of the last of the serious celebrity authors. He contributed at least a few memorable phrases to the American lexicon, one...
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Beyond the “Other Victorians”
To call something “Victorian” is, in left-liberal parlance, to say that you don’t like it. The fact that hardly anything routinely called “Victorian” accurately characterizes the era of Queen Victoria’s long reign, from 1837 to 1901, is one of the great historiographical tragedies of the 20th century. Thus, when a large number of African bishops...
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Forgetting a Villian
Imagine it is the year 2030, and you are talking to some young adults. To your horror, you find that they have never heard the name Osama bin Laden. As you begin to rant about the ignorance of the young, you find to your still greater astonishment that none of your older friends have any...
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Christmas, Texas
I am fumbling in the console, looking for my Jim Reeves Christmas CD, when I notice the wall of rolling, gray clouds approaching from the east. The sun is sliding slowly beneath the horizon in the west, shooting shards of orange-red hues into the purple-blue sky, presenting a striking contrast to the dark gray wall,...
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Millions for Tribute
That imperial anthem, the hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps, is today somehow an obscure exercise. The halls of Montezuma? The shores of Tripoli? Our gum-popping, Gucci-schlepping youth can no more respond to its referential difficulties than could the Ivy League-credentialed savants of the War Party. What’s more, the pseudopatriots would be shocked to know that...
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A Giant Beset by Pygmies
Most newspaper and magazine articles are forgotten not long after they appear. Does anyone read the 25-year-old columns of Norman Podhoretz, William F. Buckley, or Richard John Neuhaus for insight into current events? It therefore tells us something when First Things prints a 20-page essay about a political journalist who has been dead for almost...
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Filmlog: Liliom
Frank Borzage may well be the best film director born in the United States, and I haven’t forgotten John Ford, who was also a master. Borzage, the son of Italian-Swiss immigrants, achieved much in his films that can only be understood as Catholic art, which is why his movies are now mostly unwatched or,...
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A King for France?
Kings and dynasties seemed to be buried and forgotten when two recent events revived interest in them. On a frivolous but historically significant level, it was the series of scandals of the House of Windsor that brought Europe’s ruling families brutally in the limelight. The general trend of desacralization is voracious for frequent feeding, and...
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Crimea: Myths and Memories
With the Brown Revolution running into a war of Russian resistance in the Crimea, the pleasant Peninsula, forgotten for two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union is all of the sudden at the top of all media headlines and is being discussed by talking heads on both sides of the Atlantic. As to...
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Of Strife and Speeches
A New Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at Gettysburg by Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr.; Little, Brown; Boston. On November 19, 1863, after Edward Everett had completed a now-forgotten oration of almost two hours at the dedication of a national cemetery on one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battlefields, Abraham Lincoln rose to deliver “a few remarks.”...
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Merian Cooper, Conquering Hero
With the war in Ukraine dangerously close to Poland, the specter is raised of the forgotten Polish-Soviet War of 1920. American pilots came to Poland's aid in that war, most importantly World War I veteran and King Kong director Merian C. Cooper.
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Albion Down
Recent events in the United Kingdom, show that moral Britain is not only dead, in the words of our own Christie Davis, but buried and forgotten. Consider the following two news items. First, the funeral of Tony Benn, the godfather of the hard Left in Britain, darling of that Midwestern socialist blowhard Michael Moore and...
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Islam, Europe, and Slavery
At Midsummer 1631, Barbary pirates from North Africa raided the Irish village of Baltimore, and took several hundred local people into lifelong captivity. Such a distant projection of Islamic power might seem extreme and even bizarre, but it was no such thing. Forgotten today, the danger of Arab and Turkish assault remained a nightmare for...
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On Outsourcing
As a faithful reader of Chronicles, I was sorely disappointed to see Tom Piatak’s “Outsourcing Our Future” (American Proscenium, May). Mr. Piatak takes the ridiculous but all-too-oft-repeated stance that, when Americans “lose” jobs to overseas workers, America suffers. He appears to have forgotten one of the fundamental lessons of economics: the lesson of comparative advantage,...
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In a Savage World
This latest volume of George Garrett’s stories and sketches is proof that the old fox has not forgotten how to raid our American cultural henhouse without running away with a few plump chickens. Chronicles readers should not have to be told that Garrett, a long-time contributing editor to this magazine, is the master of several...
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A Bittersweet Conclusion
After so many years living in exile up north, Héctor had forgotten how pleasant fall in the Chihuahuan Desert can be, the summer heat banished for good and the first snows not yet upon the desert mountains that enclose the city on three sides. From his office on the top floor of the Museo de...
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America: An Us vs. Them Country
“Send her back! Send her back!” The 13 seconds of that chant at the rally in North Carolina, in response to Donald Trump’s recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not soon be forgotten, or forgiven. This phrase will have a long shelf life. T-shirts emblazoned with “Send Her Back!” and Old...
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Jihad’s Fifth Column
No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam. Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...
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The Italian Counterrevolutions of 1799
Who says that conservative historians have to be old, hoary-headed men unable to produce anything innovative? A young Italian scholar named Massimo Viglione is proving the contrary with his two latest books, Rivolte dimenticate (Forgotten Revolts) and Le Insorgenze—Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Italia, 1792-1815 (Uprisings-Revolution and Counterrevolution in Italy). Viglione is a Catholic researcher in...
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Just How Monarchical is Monsieur Mitterrand?
Ever since Machiavelli, and probably long before that, successful statesmen have known that a plentiful stock of mendacity, as well as guile, are essential for anyone wishing to get ahead in politics. But what many of them may have forgotten during their arduous climb to the summit is that the often bitter accusations they level...
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Bob Mathias
One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. Although plagued by anemia, which caused him...
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Media More Dishonest Than SPLC
Whatever the wisdom of Pamela Geller’s Mohammed cartoon event in Garland, Texas — and there’s much not to like about it, as Chronicles executive editor, Scott Richert, wrote of Charlie Hebdo’s repulsive fare after the massacre at the magazine’s office — one thing ought not be forgotten: No matter what kind of event Geller had...
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The Poet as Cleaning Lady
Kristine Thatcher’s play Niedecker, produced earlier this year by the Women’s Project at the Apple Corps Theatre in New York, is about paradoxes. It is the story of the reclusive poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). She has been dead almost twenty years and is largely forgotten, but when she was alive Ezra Pound championed her. Basil...
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Bob Mathias
From the August 2013 issue of Chronicles. One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. ...
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The Two Lhevinnes
Though too many years have gone by since I last crossed paths with Robert K. Wallace, that doesn’t mean I have forgotten that gifted and accomplished man. I remember him well from sites and scenes in graduate school at Columbia University; from his environment in northern Kentucky and at the old Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati,...
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The Wonderful World of Porn
So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...
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Condescension Slides South
I’d forgotten that a Barnes and Noble bookstore had opened in the old department store building. As I walked back to my car in the Baltimore suburb of Towson, I remembered what I’d seen in the other bookstore closer to home, so I changed my path a little, pushed open the heavy door, and headed...
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Immigration: A History Lesson
“The United States is a nation of immigrants” is a meaningless statement, but that is not to say that it has no meaning. It is one of the lead lines for the Democratic/liberal/progressive agenda, and has been ever since Israel Zangwill used the mythic term “melting pot” as the title of his thankfully forgotten play...